Silence and traffic lights won't do!

Policy and Strategy Commitee, which met today, remains an experience that bears no relation to its title.

The Corporate monitoring report which we discussed today, helpfully has little "traffic lights" to say whether a particular area of work is on target or not, red being not on target etc. I asked lots of questions about several that had red lights as I thought that was the job of the opposition, to ask questions and scrutinise things that were not going well. Apparently not. It was clear that this was not appreciated by the SNP/Libdem administration who were irritated by the number of questions I was asking. Of course, they want to use traffic lights to stop people talking whilst I wanted to talk about the reason for the red lights....

Anyway, several of my questions were about the failure to meet homelessness targets. The honest answer I recieved from the officer was until we sort out our housing supply, we will never meet our targets. Not surprising as we all know we are in a housing crisis now, but what surprising was later on the the meeting we were responding to the Scottish Government's Consultation on poverty, the section on funding for affordable housing had the pathetic and wishy washy line "it would be helpful if the formula was changed"!

I got them to change it for something much more robust but no wonder we are struggling if we praise a cut in funding as success (see here) but then beat about the bush when we have a chance to stand up for Edinburgh.